Windows 10 on a 8 years old lifebook? yes, it works.

View days ago, a mate gave me a laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook E736) with a windows 7 pro and asked me to remove a malicious program, his virus scanner was the opinion of a infected system. Ok. Done. That was not the matter.

We discussed the situation after February 2020 – windows 7 will not be longer supported by microsoft.

The notebook is (as i mentioned above) a Fujitsu Lifebook E736 with an i3-Processor and 4 GB RAM.  The first look was at Fujitsus Website for drivers. Hm. There just Windows 7 ones for download. So installing and configuring windows 10 on this hardware would be an intressting small project. If all goes right and setup will recognize the hardware, the owner could get a machine for surfing, doing office and multimedia and the laptop goes further as a usefull tool. Lets start.

I have changed the hdd with a Sandisk 670 EVO SSD with 512 GB. Then i downloaded a windows 10 64bit Image from microsoft and installed it via a DVD onto the ssd. During the installation, i choosed the windows 10 home verison (i did not mentioned, how simple was the activation later). The installation was fine, so i downloaded the media creators tool and pushed the current version 1909 on it. Fine. After this i checked the driver via the computer management, and i – astonnished – recognized, that nearly all drivers were found by microsoft native setup installations. Except the card reader is not working.

Windows 10 on a 8 years old laptop - see the desktop
Windows 10 on a 8 years old laptop – see the desktop

The start menue is working very fast, starting the computer management via the start menue takes about 2 seconds. The memory wth a size of 4 GB is about at 50%.

But hows about the actvation? On the lower side of the machine, there is a windows 7 license key sticker. I choosed the activation app of windows, typed in the key and two intresting things happened: first was that microsoft activated with the key the windows 10 and second, it moved from windows 10 home to windows 10 pro.

This action took just view hours on time and the result is very welcome. Now we have a sensfull job for a aged machine with a new windows, for years until maybe the hardware will be unrepairable damaged.

The disadvantage is maybe the battery-power. Batteries of older devices mostly giving power for just few minutes. In this case, we have a such Battery: Plugging off the power cord and few minutes later, the laptop is powered off.

But in the same case, there is no matter. This device works all the time on a desk, power, mouse and keyboard and a external monitor plugged in.

My advice: 1-take a try and install a windows 10 on old machines. Important is the update setup to a current version like 1909 or newer. It might be possibel that on newer devices, you will get a better driver support. So you will have a reliable system for coming jobs like browsing, office, small/medium multimedia, programming, and so on. And you are doing good because you releave the environment. 2-the lifebook E-series is like for office or pro use. If you keep off the next time again and spend a little much more for your device, the change to work longer without problems is better because office and pro devices are builded with a higher quality standard and the driver support is more sustainable.